Well - these threads always go on for a long time, but...
I've used matlab heavily for 10 years. I found that I had to use perl
and C fairly heavily to get things done that matlab could not do well.
Now I've switched to numpy, scipy, matplotlib, there is really
nothing I miss in matlab. We would not attempt what we are doing now:
http://neuroimaging.scipy.org/
in matlab - it's just not the right tool for a large scale programming effort.
I agree that matlab has many attractions as a teaching tool and for
small numeric processing scripts, but if you are writing a large to
medium-sized application, I really don't think there is any
comparison...
Matthew